


Questions

by sophiagratia



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-15
Updated: 2011-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:51:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake Sisko is always one step behind Tora Ziyal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Questions

It started with an argument that he thought was theoretical until it was far too late.

‘Quark!’ Her voice blithe and bright as ever and utterly dread-inducing. ‘Quark, come over here for a second.’

‘Ziyal! Don’t – what does Quark know about –’ but to Jake’s horror, the Ferengi was already well within earshot. (Then again, is any Ferengi ever really _out_ of earshot?)

‘I know a lot of things about a lot of things, young man, most of them things you’d rather not know.’ Quark’s hiss was an amicable one – or, maybe. Jake hoped so. ‘And lovely Ziyal! What can I do for you this evening, my dear? I have a very fine spring wine just in from Kendra Province. Perhaps?’ Ziyal smiled sweetly and nodded.

‘Thank you, Quark, and how thoughtful of you to remember my favorite! Now, I have a very serious question for you.’ Jake’s forehead fell into his palms.

Quark, meanwhile, bowed gallantly. ‘All my wisdom is at your command!’ As Ziyal accepted her spring wine, Jake halfheartedly held up his tumbler for another measure of the peaty Scotch whiskey he was actually starting to grow fond of.

‘Well, Jake and I have been having a rather heated discussion, and I hope you might be willing to resolve it for us.’ Jake wondered if anyone else knew how to recognize mischief in all the blithe innocence that radiated from any of Ziyal’s wide range of smiles. He hoped not, for anyone-else’s sake. He’d rather not know it himself. ‘What, in your opinion, is an appropriate marriageable age for a human male?’

Quark keened with laughter. Jake hid his own involuntary smile behind his glass, drinking maybe a bit more enthusiastically than he meant to. He coughed; tried to repress it; made it worse; coughed harder; tried to cover with one gesture both coughing and the tears the boozey burn had brought to his eyes; failed spectacularly at keeping anything resembling his cool. Great. Quark just laughed harder, and at a higher pitch, and Ziyal chose from her repertoire a broad and radiantly terrifying grin.

Great.

* * *

‘Every night?’ Nog asked, incredulous. Not a little jealous, too, if Jake had it right, and when it came to Nog, Jake always had it right. ‘Man, I wouldn’t be complaining, I can tell you that much.’ See? Well, let him be jealous – if one good thing came out of Ziyal’s reign of flirtatious terror, it’d be that Jake Sisko’s growing reputation as a ladies’ man would go unharmed.

‘Every night, Nog! If she asks me to marry her one more time, my head is going to explode. Hey! What the hell! If you keep shooting our own dudes we are never going to beat this level.’ Okay, so maybe the middle of a holographic military compound, surrounded by holo-mutants with holo-rifles, was not the ideal setting for discussion of a girl-conundrum, but Jake was starting to find himself at a loss.

‘Well, _maybe_ if you’d focus on the task at hand instead of congratulating yourself for being such a ladies’ man, we could get to higher ground without getting shot to death! As far as Ziyal goes – DUCK!’ Nog tackled him to the ground a moment too late. As holo-fire rained down around them, Jake thought he might be better off talking about this outside of a war zone, and, more importantly, with someone who knew him just a little less well.

* * *

Then there was a real war, and Nog left, and his father left and half of everyone else he knew. And the real war just went on, and on, and Jake wrote stories that went nowhere, and the occupation never changed except to become more and more a caricature of itself – but Ziyal kept on asking.

The truth was that she was the best friend he had, and not just by circumstance. They had their artistic passions and frustrations in common, and their dead mothers and their difficult but devoted fathers. She got on with everyone he cared about, and they got very good very quickly at making each other laugh. She could beat him at dom-jot. And, after all, that repertoire of smiles really was something.

But then there was the simple and utterly confounding fact that every evening, one way or another, she proposed to him.

One afternoon, passing the security office in his now-habitual idly frustrated pacing of the Promenade, he just thought, to hell with it. A war zone was where he’d have to sort this out, after all – and maybe Odo and his impartial-minister-of-justice thing would be just what he needed.

Jake should have known better. The Odo Classic, he called it: feigned exasperation in chin uptilted, a guttural grunt and a roll of the eyes and (pause), ‘Oh, you humanoids!’ ...Pause. ‘Always complicating affairs of the heart so far beyond what’s really necessary.’

Jake resisted a scoff, but he did take the opportunity to practice his best glare of journalistic skepticism. As if Odo had a leg – simulated or otherwise – to stand on, when it came to unnecessary complication in matters of the heart. But he wasn’t here to torture the man, so he backed off.

‘Ziyal’s a fine young woman, Jake – shame about her relations, but she remains a fine young woman. You could do a lot worse.’ That last a subtle sardonic variation on the Classic.

‘Oh, no question at all about that.’

‘...And so?’ Odo was not this dense. He was faking it, wasn’t he, to get Jake to see something that he thought was obvious, and Jake just felt like an idiot. ‘Does it bother you that she keeps asking?’

‘No, not exactly, I mean. I don’t know.’ Jake spread his hands and scanned the air with his eyes, looking for the way to say what he needed to say. ‘ _Marriage_? I mean, what?’ But Odo was getting impatient with his sputtering, so he tried to collect himself. ‘I mean, I think she’s joking. About marriage. Maybe. But still. It’s just – when this war ends – if this stupid fucking war ever does end – I want to travel, I want the freedom to just go, wherever, follow stories, I don’t know, just see stuff and meet people and write what I find. And I guess in that sense I’ve always seen myself as single, or solitary, or something. You know?’ Odo’s expression softened incrementally, trading some of its counterfeit haughtiness for quiet but genuine attention.

‘I do know. And?’ Jesus, did he really have to spell it out?

‘ _And_ , I don’t know, we’re so young, not that she cares about that – Cardassians get married at, like, twelve or something. But I can’t have a partner in the life I want. Or, no. I mean, I can’t ask anyone else to live that life with me – it’d be radically unfair, to anyone. Ziyal says she wouldn’t mind, even that she’d like it, but –’ Odo raises a hand as if to say the matter is settled.

‘But what? Why not just believe her, Jake?’ Well. That was interesting. Why not?

‘Well – because – I don’t know, because I don’t want to be that guy? I don’t want to be the guy who expects the little lady to follow him everywhere. I don’t ever want to make anyone feel like they’re just another piece of my luggage.’ Odo waved off this line of thinking and – was he smiling? Odo? Jake might be in this deeper than he’d imagined.

‘Here’s a thought experiment. Picture the look on Ziyal’s face if she knew you were referring to her, even implicitly, as “the little lady.” Let alone “luggage.” Picture that face, and then ask yourself if that young woman’s not competent to make her own decisions.’ He _was_ smiling, damn him.

He was also right.

* * *

More good came out of what Jake eventually began to think of as The Ritual of the Question than he would have imagined – or, given the circumstances, wished for.

It was a simple fact, but he learned it better day by day. The war had rearranged his whole world, and the only real constant, from before to after, was Ziyal’s nightly proposal – and, as he was beginning to see, Ziyal herself, with her clarity and determination, her refusal to be diminished by this war.

There was a moment when he thought she might start to forget about the ritual. As she spent more time with her father, started to think more seriously about Cardassia and about what it meant to her to be Cardassian and about the possibility of a life in the Union, he thought she might start to neglect their evenings at Quark’s, their dinners with Major Kira, their late-night card games in his quarters. But she never missed her question even once.

Sometimes it was just a matter of course. Over dinner, say. Casually. With Rom and Leeta lost to the world, whispering together, and the Major imbroiled in voluble conflict with Quark, their bizarre little war-made family all distracted, just casually, Ziyal would lean across the table and, with one of many possible smiles, she would say, ‘Jake Sisko, you’re going to marry me one day, and you might as well accept it.’ And she would straighten and return, as though nothing had passed between them, to her food and the conversation, chatting happily (and, he couldn’t help but observe, articulately and intelligently) about early Bajoran line-drawing or twenty-third century Romulan espionage novels or the relative sublimity of Kira’s latest experiment with hasperat brine. And he wouldn’t even have time to object or blush or sigh, or throw up his hands, and that would be that.

Sometimes she would surprise him, and he would laugh, and she would arch her elegant ridged brows as if to say, ‘You’re coming along.’ She’d get him in the morning, sometimes, catch him off guard over his coffee as he sat writing in the replimat. In a stroke of sheer frustration, once, unable to find a satisfactory end for a story, he dashed off an agitatedly italicized, ‘ _And he just lived happily ever fucking after_.’ He rose to refill his coffee, and when he returned, he found his sentence amended: ‘... _because he married Tora fucking Ziyal_.’ He hadn’t even seen her come in, or leave. (Cardassian. Definitely. Though if Major Kira was anything to go by, maybe just Bajoran after all. Still, nothing had actually exploded. Yet. Cardassian, then.) Yes, he laughed. An hour later in a corridor, she winked at him, and he stroked his jaw to hide his blush and shrugged against her father’s glare.

Dukat for a father-in-law. _There_ was a frightening thought. He tried hard not to think that thought, ever.

Sometimes he thought she didn’t even mean any of it, that it was all some weird, grand joke for her. It wasn’t like they’d ever been involved – though they could be, maybe, someday. He could see it, and seeing it felt comfortable. And they _were_ so young, and there was a lot of time for someday, but now? However much he sometimes felt she was the closest thing he had to a real partner, ‘involved’ was not what they were. So it seemed like a joke, sometimes.

But then, sometimes they would just forget themselves in coversation, and there would come a pause – ‘the comfort of companionable silence,’ he later wrote. She would look at him with what he thought of as her sincerest smile, a secretive, involuntary thing, just barely a smile at all, and she would speak her question with her eyes alone. He kissed her cool, aristocratic cheek for that, once. Neither of them ever mentioned that again. But it was definitely not a joke.

She was a bright, consistent pattern in this dulled, diminished, and unstable world – and once more, he didn’t manage to figure out what that meant until it was far too late.

* * *

Nights on the station are neither colder nor darker than days, but this one feels like it is, or should be. He has his father and Nog back, but this dark, cold night, he’s alone in a way he’s never been before.

Major Kira’s hand surprises him, a little, light on his elbow. ‘Jake?’ And her voice is unusually soft. She must know. Ziyal must have told her.

‘I’m all right, Major.’

‘It’s okay not to be, you know.’

‘I know.’ She’s not okay either, somehow he knows that, but she’s all her usual strength and vital energy anyway. He wouldn’t mind learning that trick, but now, after this, this and everything else but above all this, he doesn’t think he could stand to learn it the way she did.

‘All right, well. How about if _I_ start asking you to marry me every night?’ Kira’s range of grins is limited, comparatively, but they’re all honest, and they’re all infectious. Even now, with his grief still fresh, Jake can’t help smiling back.

‘I think that would be terrifying, Major. Uh. With respect.’ She laughs. ‘But the thing is?’ And his smile is gone, and he swallows hard.

‘Hmm?’ She’s thoughtful and distant. Maybe she doesn’t know, after all, not really.

‘The thing is, I was really starting to think about saying yes.’

She nods quietly, and she takes his hand, and they stand at the window together in silence, and look out at the stars. Just a few moments, but it’s enough to get Jake thinking that maybe this is one way to learn that trick of strength.

When they happen to find each other there the next evening, they pretend that it’s by chance and say nothing, and for a moment, they watch the stars together. And then it happens again, and then every evening after.


End file.
